Employability is something of the elephant in the room in higher education. We dream of students enthralled at learning new knowledge, making discoveries of their own as they develop their curiosity and strengthening their identities as they work with others.

For many of course, the reality is that they are undertaking their programme of study to get a good ‘job’ at the end. I use quotation marks because the nature of the ‘job’ may be wide and varied: it might be traditional employed work; self-employment; voluntary work; portfolio working; or a combination of these.

I completely agree technology is under used in this area. There are plenty of options available, and even internal tools like MyPortfolio (https://myportfolio.ucl.ac.uk/) at UCL can be useful tools for employability.

MyPortfolio can be useful to help students log what they are doing, as they are doing it so they can come back to more vibrant recollections when they need them. It is also a useful space for them to collect and curate examples of their work. All of this can be shared as desired with employers to showcase their work and evidence their CV (as well as offering an online CV builder). In previous projects I’ve done with similar tools employers have reported finding the portfolios useful: http://mahara.solent.ac.uk/view/view.php?t=krvL6aKTgAObyD1soQJ7